Sound the news-horn! Sound it from the highest mountains! Ready your loins! Thief is back.

Unconfirmed leak, yada yada, you know the drill. But, yes, this very much appears to be screenshots of Square-Enix’s rebooted Thief series and OHMIGOD THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING.

Update: now confirmed as real, called ‘Thief’, out on PC and next-gen consoleboxes in 2014.

It looks a lot like Dishonored, dunnit? But then Dishonored looked a lot like Thief, eh? This comes, lest we forget, from the team who did a pretty darn-tootin’ good job of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and now they now get a swing at another PC gaming classic, hopefully with the benefit of experience and hindsight. The godfather of stealth has returned at last: what stories will he tell?

The full, original, batch of screenshots are on GamesManiac (discovered, inevitably, by NeoGAF), but I’ve put a few here for your assessment until someone tells me not to. Click on ‘em for much larger versions, if you like.

Well! What about that then? If I’m honest I might have liked something a little more stylised, but it’s certainly moody, and I suppose that’s what we want from Garrett’s dark, grubby cityscapes. These images are tagged with stuff about ‘next-gen’ consoles, which is obviously all kinds of vague and unconfirmed, but if true hopefully means we’re in for a very pretty PC game rather than one that has to play nice with the last-generation of under-telly boxes.

But wait, there’s more!

Just ‘Thief’ then, do we think? I quite like that. Clean. To the point. Deadly.

Update! Aha! The industry’s default beneficiary of game reveal exclusives, GameStop’s in-store magazine Game Informer, has just gone live with news on its next cover, which is a game indeed called “Thief.” The game’s confirmed as for PC and PS4 so far, with the inveitable Xbox 720 or whatever it’s called likely in there too. They also give this summary:

Series hero Garrett returns to the Gothic, industrial metropolis known simply as the City to steal any and everything that will make him richer. Unfortunately, the City is broiling with social tension as it is ravaged by a plague and lorded over by a political tyrant known as the Baron. In order to survive his adventures, Garrett will have to pay attention to his environment and make use of the may possible paths through each of the game’s levels.

I think you have just got used to last generation graphics. This is built from the ground up to work on 2012 (e.g. the PS4) graphics hardware. The massive budgets of uber game companies just caught up with 6 years of graphics tech development – there’s no reason why it wouldn’t genuinely look that good.

As a matter of fact, I’d go even further and say that, even if those were indeed undoctored real-time rendered graphics (hah, hah), I’m still yawning at them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: ZOMG those textures are so sharp and everything is so shiny and you can see the pores in the characters’ faces and what have you. So what? Me, I don’t care. I truly, honest-to-God can’t give a rat’s ass about this kind of visual style. And I seriously hope I’m not the only one. Here’s some advice for people who feel those strong urges to see hyper-realistic pictures: Go watch a movie. No game is going to beat that anytime soon.

If we ever expect to have our little hobby acknowledged as an artform, we really need to start thinking outside the fucking crate –and we need to start by getting rid of photorealism.

GunnerMcCaffrey, do you honestly think pointing out the third screenshot looks like a brothel is sexist, are you just being obtuse, or did you not actually look at it long enough to notice they’re walking around in their underwear talking with richly dressed men who are wearing masks.

Looks pretty nice, although not really a fan of the hands in the first person view, looks a bit weird. The blurry one in front of the table looks like some sort of object highlighting like in Human Revolution, but as a special view mode rather than always-on, which seems a good compromise.

I didn’t mind hands in shot on these things until I installed a mod for skyrim which modelled the player body in first person. Look down to see your torso etc. and realised that for years I have been playing games where the protagonists are running around constantly holding their hands up in front of their faces like humorously exaggerated cartoon villains sneaking around on tip toes

It really freaks me out in FPS games now if I can’t see my avatar’s body or shadow. Being a disembodied camera viewpoint with only hands and forearms (or sometimes not even those) is very disconcerting. More full body experiences please, Gaming Industry.

I was thinking the same thing: HR was good but no Deus Ex, but then I wondered whether even the Deus Ex team could remake Deus Ex. Maybe it was a glorious and unrepeatable accident, like the beginning of life or the time you made a soufflé; its perfection now only available in the sepia pages of memory.

Nah, it’s just a matter of having a clear philosophy. In Deus Ex, the environments were places first, and game levels second. In DX:HR, everything was designed explicitly for the player.

Many many game designers, both PC and tabletop, will tell you that’s good and the right thing to do. But it misses the point of creating a deeper experience, looking beyond only the immediate choices a player can make. That more than anything is what’s lacking in modern videogames.

Er, no. If it were a Deus Ex game, you would have had to WORK for your ending of choice (even the consolized-to-the-point-of-BLECH Invisible War got that bit right) instead of beating a boss and then quicksaving at a row of buttons and clicking & reloading to see all the endings without earning them.

You couldn’t get all the endings on one playthrough of DXHR though. I can’t remember exactly how many endings there were, but there were at least 3 variations on each button depending on how you played the rest of the game.

Yup, 3 slightly different monologues, depending if you were good, neutral or bad. Funny, thing is, I don’t think anyone knows how that’s decided – some sources say it depends how many enemies you kill.

And if that’s true, that would make DEHR first game where ending depends you player’s playstyle, not how he end quests.

Also, you may want to go replay Deus Ex. You “work” for your ending by going to a slightly different part of one big room and maybe killing a robot or two or dodging some sludge.

You’re the one who needs to play it again. There are entirely different objectives taking place across more than one map. I don’t even know what you mean by “sludge”. You must have a really bad memory if you think Deus Ex’s ending choices are “four buttons in a room”.

Yeah, the emergent gameplay is what I meant when I said it wasn’t really a Deus Ex game. The interactivity of the world and the way the powers were designed didn’t bring out the kinds of crazy water cooler moments that made me love Deus Ex.

Interestingly, the modern games that have have those kinds of moments are primarily the Bethesda games and, of all things, the first Crysis. Something I hadn’t really thought about until now.

While I don’t consider the original Deus Ex to have the best approach to multiple endings, each of the “end game buttons” were all in distinctly different parts of the final level, each with a separate objective that had to be fulfilled first, not all in the same room.

And there are some fairly big differences between the Deus Ex and Human Revolution, one of the more notable ones being the distinction between big open areas and more enclosed corridors for missions, important since Invisible War’s use of corridors over open areas was among lot of people’s reasons for saying it sucked.

This is all intriguing to me, as I’m currently playing through DXHR. I’ve never actually finished Deus Ex properly (never got beyond Hong Kong). But I’m finding that elements of the original that I did experience are shoehorned into the game to try and make it more like the original. And yet no multitool!

Must have been very odd for the team making it to deal with Dishonoured coming out. On the one hand, hooray for a game similar to theirs being praised and generally received well. On the other, there are surely “everyone’s going to call us Dishonoured with bows” worries.

I’m so with you, got a bit worried when half the revs left the studio, and when the producer said “Thi4f will be about more than stealth”; but yes, it is now an undeniable fact that there is a first person option, along with physical hands, rope arrows are back (ker-spooge!), and best of all Garret doesn’t even have a sword in any of the screenshots. I’m praying for a game where killing is entirely unnessecary, in fact is even like to see an option where the blackjack is removed (feels a bit too much like from-behind killing). I want to be a thief, not a swordsman, not an assassin, a THIEF. Judging from the screen shots it might be happy days.

One thing worries me though: The screenshot with Garrett sticking his hands in a guard’s face. That indicates a non-lethal takedown from the front which is all wrong. Being able to kill guards in combat with the ease of a button press is not something a thief should even be capable of doing.

Reading some more of the GameInformer article, Thief will mostly be about escaping dangerous situations, so yeah Crowded is a good description. There’s a rechargeable “focus” mode that lets you demolish guards in one-on-one combat, and they mention environmental hazards like shooting arrows at chandeliers to crush guards standing below. The grapple claw suggests escaping could be as easy as grappling onto a nearby roof.

Sounds fun, although I’m sad that Garrett is becoming more superhuman. The action-hero stuff is neat, but it’s not really Thief.

Oh I love you. This is exactly what I was thinking that thief needed, I got sick of the “get found-reload” mechanic of Dishonoured forced on you by it’s roster of achievements. I hope thief has no achievement for not being detected, ; being caught should necessitate escape, it should be PART OF THE GAME. Reloading because discovery is so catastrophic really kills the immersion.

Also snargle you’re right, thief was part of the ‘new man’ hero trend of the ’90’s along with Gordon Freeman where ordinary and outgunned people would come out on top, a move away from the ‘action heroes’ like Duke Nukem. It would be a shame if this underdog mentality didn’t come across in the new game. Corto is not Garret, thief is a disempowerment fantasy rather than an empowerment one.

“While in combat, Focus displays a number of attack points on Garret’s enemies. Garrett can select one of these points, the chest for example, and do a quick push that buys him some time to dash off into the shadows. Alternatively he can string together a number of these points, which uses more Focus and perform a more debilitating attack”

“We want you to play as a thief, but we don’t to force you to play as a thief. You can play the game aggressively if you want, but it won’t be easy.”

Apparently Focus is a finite (recharging) resource, so small encounters will be incredibly easy and large ones will be very hard. This turns combat into sort of a resource management game. It actually sounds fun, but not at all scary or tense like the previous Thief games.

The stuff in quotes is from the GameInformer article. Only available for subscribers unfortunately.

I don’t think you’re being fair – it’s all just a quick summary of features. Of course the ultimate goal will be to sneak about unseen. They’re crystal clear about that.

I don’t see anything wrong with additional options – you can blackjack the guy or you can topple a gargoyle on him from the rooftop. Where’s the fault in having that option?

In Thief I & II it was actually quite easy to win swordfights if you knew how to, and it was extremely easy to just fire arrow the guards – but you wouldn’t do that, would you, because the point of the game was something else.

There’ve been enough underwhelming reboots recently that I’m not going to get automatically excited at the appearance of an old name. I mean here’s hoping it’s good, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just because some decade old games were awesome.

Also, I’m not that getting worked up about the announcement of a reboot sits entirely comfortably with recent comments in RPS articles that nostalgia is the cancer killing Kickstarter…

Heh. DX:HR’s actually one of the underwhelming reboots I had in mind. It’s not bad – it’s good, I enjoyed it – but for me it was a fun MGS-alike to play through and not an awful lot more. That’s not to say that A) that’ll definitely happen with Thief IV or that B) if it does then it won’t be fun, but the prospect of DX:HR Dark Ages doesn’t really compare to The Dark Project for me.

Couldn’t they just make some sequel in the same world with the same time of gameplay WITHOUT Garrett as a main character? It seems like these days they just reboot any series where writing a sequel would be too hard.

The constant reboot cycles become more bearable when you realize that we’ve always been doing it as humans.

Our religions are reboots of older religions, our political ideals are reboots of older political ideals, our music goes in cycles as well.

We’ve always been rebooters, it is not realistic to assume we’ll stop. The only thing that has significantly changed is the length of the reboot cycles and the fact that we have better documentation of works that came before, so we recognize a reboot a lot faster.

I’ve been waiting on any news on this game since 2009 and now suddenly a glittering rain of screenshots. With my great love of the series and Eidos-Montreal’s work on Human Revolution, my money has already been stolen.

Fun anecdote on lighting, I was playing Hitman 2 the other day and one of the levels supplies you with a night vision mask to make sneaking around in the dark easier, well nuts to that I said, I just fiddled with the gamma. Hooray for PC!

There’s some other details about the proportions of things that seem off; in my head I’d transferred the blockyness of the games architecture into a quite spartan architectural style, whereas this is all bits everywhere, but more than anything it’s the diffusion and brightness of the lighting; one great way to cheat darkness is with more discrete shadows, (assuming the number of light sources is much lower) whereas these shadows are very soft edged.

I replayed Thief Gold and Thief 2 late last year, in stereo 3D too (nvidia 3D Vision – which RPS thinks is ‘tat’ btw), and they’re as good as ever, absolutely stellar games.

Pretty much zero interest in this though, and likewise I’ve never touched Thief 3. I’ve read enough about T3 at TTLG to know it’s not a real Thief game in any meaningful way, and I find it very unlikely T4 will be either given modern gaming trends.

Aww, T3 had its issues and is admittedly a slight departure from the core values of the series in some ways, but it did have a lovely atmosphere that made me want to keep playing until the end. Well almost until the end, because fuck Shalebridge Cradle.

It’s a shame because this website has made you miss out on an excellent game that is very much in the spirit of the first two thief games. I would stop reading it if I were you, any website that’s convinced you that T3 isn’t a proper thief game is just spouting utter bullshit.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about the general consensus among Thief fans who inhabit the TTLG forums. TBH I can’t even remember what I read that put me off trying it, but I did look into it. It was probably the amount of in-level loading.

One thing for sure though, it isn’t the open world Thief 3 Looking Glass were making when they shut down, and few of the LG team worked on it.

You should definitively have a look at it, it did do some good things. The Cradle is one of the finest examples of building an atmosphere to date.

It’s not so much a Thief game though; The Dark Mod did a much better job of capturing the spirit of Thief with some of its fan-made missions. But as with DXHR, this is not necessarily a shortcoming.

There are a few areas where TDS does fall short however, and I suspect your enjoyment depends on how much you care about the following:
* If you loved just exploring the vast, interconnected city, you’ll find TDS to be cramped and oppressive. The small levels and frequent load zones turn each area into something more like a disjointed puzzle box.
* If you loved playing the silent trespasser in a sleeping city, you may be dismayed to learn that there will be frequent midnight brawls in the city plaza. AI fight each other without any involvement on your part and for no reason other than being different “factions”.
* If you loved the brash and dynamic music of the earlier games, you may find the constant slow ambient drone of TDS somewhat underwhelming.
* If you like all the colors of the spectrum, you’ll get blue haze instead. I note with worry that this seems to be true of the shots in this article as well.

While Thief 3 may not be quite as flawless as 1 and 2, it is still very much a Thief game. If you consider yourself a fan of the series, I think you should at least check it out. The biggest problems are that it has a few issues with modern systems, and there are a lot more loading screens due to console limitations.

I’ll say I hope this game is only a mix of third-person like Deus Ex: Human Revolution. A large focus on Third-Person like they implemented in Thief: Deadly Shadows made the whole game feel wonky for a series veteran.

Good heavens not a brothel, those places have no place in the dark, corrupt world of Thief, I mean scantily clad women exist there, scantily clad women designed to fleece money from rich lonely men with deep pockets and perhaps keys to their safes, why EVER would young Garrett find himself in such an establishment?!

If anyone reads this, please pay close attention to the script. Thief has always had superlative scripts. And when you have to hang around under a desk waiting for someone to move for like ten minutes, having great dialogue to listen to really makes the experience SO much better. Dishonored really dropped the ball in that regard (whisky and cigars etc, whatevs).

A very good point. Looking Glass also showed a huge amount of restraint regarding what you heard, read, and was said in cutscenes. They managed to keep exposition to a minimum while still keeping a nice level of depth and complexity in the story and setting.

Very cool, but I have this unfortunate feeling that it’s going to be streamlined in a negative way. In my opinion, every stealth game as of late including Dishonored and Mark of the Ninja, despite being fun in general, have all had little instances of simplification (for lack of a better word) so that the overall game could be more easily played by those who do not very much care for serious stealth experiences to begin with. A single example for both games would be the ability to see through walls which eliminates any need to cautiously and cleverly scope out a set area before advancing.

At this point, though, all I ask for is that the game focuses on the practice of thievery rather than homicide.

I suppose I can understand your point about Dishonored, but how exactly could you “scope out” unexplored areas from a 2D PC-centered perspective without seeing through walls? Especially in MotN’s heavily segmented levels?

Not to mention that being able to hear guys through walls is kind of important for a stealth game, and 3D positional audio doesn’t work in 2D.

Just to be clear, I was talking about the farsight ability. I didn’t have an issue at all with leaning up against a door and being able see people on the other side. The sound notifications that appear when a guard is walking out of sight was fine, too.

LOVE that Thief is back yes yes YES!
LOVE that the publishers removed that stupid ‘4’ from inside the title.
LOVE that it’s Garret once again (Hearing Stephen Russell all over the place in Skyrim made me pine for Garrett very badly)

PLEASED that Thief is being treated as a Next-Gen console launch title. Gives it a chance to bloom for new audiences.

NOT SO SURE about the screenies and concept shots, undeniably beautiful though they are. Stylistically it looks very different, almost unrecognisable as The City of earlier games. This could be a very different game, one that feels it has to become Dishonoured to be appealing.

Fair point, but 12-24 months is still a long time to move designs in the general direction of something that was recently quite successful. And that’s assuming the “Teef” team didn’t have access to Dishonoured’s dev/publicity material before its release…

Best stealth series evoir and also one of the best D&D inspired games. One of the things I would complain about is the extravagant-decadent style creeping into some screenshots. That’s just in all “sophisticated” first-person games nowadays and it doesn’t quite fit into the unique (or archetypal) atmosphere of Thief. I also hope Garret still totally sucks at all kinds of combat.